What is it about?
Why do some people become experts in their fields while others don’t? There are many factors to this answer, but for a long time, scientists had thought differences in individuals’ abilities to perceive visual, auditory and other external information was not one of them. Individual variability in perceptual learning had long been considered random fluctuations or “noise” by scientists. We trained 49 participants in seven visual, auditory, and working memory tasks, each in five consecutive daily sessions lasting around one hour, for a total of 35 days and 23,720 trials per participant. We found that individual differences in general perceptual learning ability did indeed affect a person’s ability to excel in specific tasks. High IQ, extraversion, and openness scores were linked to better learning ability, while high scores in neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness caused negative effects on perceptual learning.
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Why is it important?
The results may have important implications for identifying elite learners such as baseball players because general perceptual learning ability could provide a criterion to help sort out the best learners who are more likely to perform better in learning perceptual skills, as well as designing better rehabilitation plans for patients. For example, when treating eye diseases, one can use a small set of training tasks to test the patients’ visual learning ability to decide whether the training is effective and design the optimal treatment plan for each individual patient.
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This page is a summary of: General learning ability in perceptual learning, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2002903117.
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